Gary Brown: Paper or plastic?

Sunday

May 13, 2018 at 6:03 AM

Success in shopping wisely is in the bag.

Paper or plastic?

It's a checkout counter question that defines a generation of grocery shoppers.

Say paper and you are old school, a shopper from the bygone days when bags were brown and made noise when you rolled over their openings at the top. And as you carried your groceries to the car, you hoped the ice cream didn't perspire in the heat, wet the bottom of the bag, weaken the sack, then deposit your groceries on the pavement in the parking lot.

"Hold the bottom of that bag, it's got cold stuff in it," my dad used to tell his relatively helpful offspring.

He spoke from experience. Each of his sons and even his more careful daughter had, at one time or another, accidentally ripped a bag or two and dropped frozen or chilled foods -- along with a soon-to-be-broken bottle of mustard, ketchup or mayonnaise -- onto the asphalt before reaching safe storage in the back of the family's station wagon.

"Better double bag that one," he'd sometimes tell the bag-packer in the store.

Proper Bagging

Bag-packers? I say that as if it's a career. At one time, it was, at least to teenagers of my generation, who became skilled at it as they earned money to pay for school or to purchase their own car.

The days when brown paper bags were used to carry groceries was an era when young men and women, who stationed themselves at the finishing end of a checkout counter, needed to possess skills at packing. They couldn't pack bags that were too heavy because it might burden their customers. Yet they shouldn't pack too many bags because a guy can only carry so many paper sacks -- one in each arm and maybe a little one between his teeth.

A bag-packer had to plan ahead to effectively utilize the rectangular space that a brown paper bag afforded. And the packer had to place like items together in a bag, so they could be stowed easily at home. All the while, this keeper of the store's reputation for quality goods had to remember to put fragile items at the top of the bag of groceries, so a carton of eggs wasn't cracked or a loaf of bread squashed when it arrived at its destination. This wasn't an easy task, no matter how many times a frustrated checkout cashier rolled her eyes and explained it all again, especially for a bag-packer who just wanted the working day to end so he could get out of the store and play basketball with his friends.

Going Plastic

Then they brought in the plastic bag.

To this day, except for assuming that they were less expensive, I'm not sure why stores went to plastic bags. Certainly, you can print a store's name on either paper or plastic. Saving the bags for later use or for discarding was no more convenient because you folded one bag and rolled up the other.

"Paper or plastic," store clerks initially asked customers, and my parents, being experienced in transporting covered dishes to family gatherings or gently-worn clothing items to church sales in old-style sacks, always preferred paper. Although my mother, being a considerate 1950s and 1960s mom, usually added, "But, really, whatever is most convenient for you ..."

Of course, plastic was most convenient. A kid needed few packing skills to distribute groceries in plastic bags, which sort of molded themselves to whatever groceries you threw into them. Keep glass bottles away from each other -- although this was the same era in which glass bottles also were replaced by plastic -- and a bag-packer pretty much had job security. Remember to put eggs and bread into their own bags and a guy was likely to win an employee of the month award.

Uncomfortable with change, I tried to hold out as long as possible, requesting paper bags whenever I was given the choice. But, eventually, I caved to an economy of consumerism that evolved to the point that nearly all transactions were completed with products packed in plastic.

I not only got used to using plastic bags, I actually preferred them. I sort of enjoyed the manly capability of carrying somewhere between one and 171 plastic bags in one hand, depending upon how you slipped fingers through the loops at the top. And I liked the way I could squeeze the air out of plastic bags, knot them up, and throw them into an even larger plastic bag so I could save a thousand or so of them in order to use one or two of them a year to cover shoes or sandals in my suitcase when I traveled.

But, the other day this paper to plastic evolution ended. Indeed, it changed course. The plastic bag may be heading toward extinction.

A store at which I buy a lot of groceries recently announced that, for ecological reasons, it would be switching from plastic to paper bags. Last week, it did. I saved the last few plastic bags from my shopping trips, but I will admit that I felt a bit uncomfortable knowing that my chief supplier of plastic bags was being eliminated. What would I wrap my banana peels up in before I threw them in the garbage in order to prevent breeding gnats? Will I have to stop eating fruit?

I'm pretty sure my parents are smiling somewhere in the afterlife. Paper or plastic? It's no longer a question of consequence.

Me? I never thought I'd say this about plastic bags, but I'm feeling a bit nostalgic.

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